Voting in the military . . .

CBFTW, a blogger in the U.S. Army and stationed in Iraq, talks about voting in the military:

. . . I can't say anything negative about my Commander In Chief, so I wont. But I also can't vote for a person who threw his medals at the White House. You just don't do something like that. Like, if I did something like that, to protest this war, that would be a total slap in the face to all my brothers in my Platoon, all the people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the people who lost their lives here, all the POW's, all the Vets, all the guys in all the other branches, and all my Drill Sgt's at Benning, and I wouldn't do something like that to them. It's hard enough as it is. Disagree with me all you want on this, but that's just how I feel.

The soldiers I know in the Army who are voting for Kerry in this election (which is a lot more than people would think) are voting for him because they're pissed off at Bush. They're pissed off because of Stop Loss, tour extensions, underestimating the amount of troops needed for Iraq, the Weapons of Mass destruction thing, the legitimacy of coming to Iraq, and they feel Kerry might also get us out of here faster. Stuff like that.

The soldiers I know who are voting for Bush are voting for him because they support him 110% on his Global War On Terrorism, and there is no shadow of a doubt that we did the right thing coming to Iraq. They feel Bush is doing a great job so far out here. A lot of the guys remember what happened to the military the last time a Democrat was in office. The guys I know who served in the military during the Clinton years, tell me all sorts of horror stories about the budget cuts. How they couldn't get any good training done, because they had no money for ammunition or anything. In training, if they ran out of bullets to fire, they would yell "Bang! Bang! Bang!" or yell "Budget Cuts! Budget Cuts! Budget Cuts!" to simulate shots being fired. Since Bush has been in office, we've never had those kinds of problems and there has been nothing but improvements in the military, we've had a couple small pay raises, and the quality of life has gone extremely up for people in the military.

White Men Can't Dance.

I love watching the Democratic National Convention on C-SPAN -- they have the best coverage of what's happening in the crowds . . . it's especially amusing to see all of the delegates trying to dance to the funky music -- and the clear discrepancy between those who have obviously got rhythm, and those who I suppose are quite sincere in their attempts to get down with the rest, I suppose, but simply cannot dance.

Justice.

Meet Samir, an interpretor for the U.S. army, who fled Iraq in 1991 to escape persecution under Hussein's regime and who over a decade later had the privilege of being among those who captured the dictator, coaxing him out of his hole in the ground.

Old Habits Die Hard

Omar from Iraq The Model has a post on the tragic consequences of a Middle East habit:

 Shooting in the air in funerals or weddings-or when something important happens-is an old tradition used in Iraq and in some other nations, originally as  communication means to inform the neighborhood and to call them to gather and participate in the occasion as there was no other *fast* way of communication at that time. Also the shooting is used to show the (muscles) of the tribe. Strangely, this method is still used even after cell phones have become available!

When I reached the health center I discovered that not only one man was dead; a woman was killed and three other people (one of them is a 7 year old kid) were injured by the falling bullets. In addition to that, a bullet had penetrated an eight thousand gallon gasoline tanker that was waiting to be evacuated near the gas station and it blew up causing a huge damage to the station (the suburb suffered from a severe shortage in gasoline for 5 days after that).

"A Mile and a Promise"

This sounds like a scene from some weepy, bad movie.

There's this young Army National Guard sergeant lying in bed at an Army hospital.

He's really down. He lost his right leg to a landmine in Afghanistan. Lot of hustle and bustle out in the hall. Someone's coming to visit the wounded.

Turns out it's the President of the United States.

He stops by the young sergeant's bed. They talk. It's a little awkward. What do you say to a guy that loves to run, loves physical activity, and now his leg is gone from the knee down.

But this sergeant tries to be upbeat and he's been told all about prosthetic legs and he has resolved that, dammit, one day he'll run again.

The President is impressed. Tell you what, he says to the sergeant, let's keep in touch and when you're ready to run a mile I'll run it with you.

Yeah, sure.

But, sure enough, a year and a half later, there's this young sergeant in shorts and an Army windbreaker, running on his prosthetic leg. And running beside him? The President of the United States.

Yeah, sure.

Well, this story is true. It really happened.

Thanks to Ralph Kinney Bennett for providing the details . . .

Orson Scott Card on John Edwards

Orson Scott Card rips Kerry's choice of VP:

The only mystery is what Edwards knew about himself that we haven't yet seen. What hidden qualities of leadership and wisdom? What fervently held beliefs that could guide his nation through difficult times?

We've seen none of these things, since he has never actually led anybody anywhere, and his opinions seem to be suspiciously close to what an election strategist might have told him it would be useful for him to believe.

Is it possible that what Edwards saw in the mirror on that fateful day was exactly what political flacks saw when they started touting him for President?

"My land, John, you're a good-looking fellow," he might have said to the mirror. "But not too good-looking. You have that semi-goofy boy-next-door quality that will make people vote for you. Especially women -- because you aren't threatening, you're just ... darling."

Iraqis say goodbye to Paul Bremer

Last week the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority handed over power to the free nation of Iraq. From what is being reported by Iraqi blogs, Paul Bremer gave an incredible speech on the day the U.S. transferred sovereignty to Iraq, which stirred many a soul and moved many of those who heard it to tears. It went unreported by the mainstream press -- no doubt because it didn't involve Iraqi insurgents and the loss of American lives. Writing for "Iraq The Model", Mohammed expresses thanks to Bremer on behalf of the Iraqi people, and, later, discusses the negligent coverage of the U.S. press. Ali, another Iraqi blogger, posts his thoughts:

The speech was impressive and you could hear the sound of a needle if one had dropped it at that time. The most sensational moment was the end of the speech when Mr. Bremer used a famous Arab emotional poem. The poem was for a famous Arab poet who said it while leaving Baghdad. Al-Jazeera had put an interpreter who tried to translate even the Arabic poem which Mr. Bremer was telling in a fair Arabic! "Let this damned interpreter shut up. We want to hear what the man is saying" One of my colloquies shouted. The scene was very touching that the guy sitting next to me (who used to sympathize with Muqtada) said "He's going to make me cry!"

Then he finished his speech by saying in Arabic,"A'ash Al-Iraq, A'ash Al-Iraq, A'ash Al-Iraq"! (Long live Iraq, Long live Iraq, long live Iraq).

I was deeply moved by this great man's words but I couldn't prevent myself from watching the effect of his words on my friends who some of them were anti-Americans and some were skeptic, although some of them have always shared my optimism. I found that they were touched even more deeply than I was. I turned to one friend who was a committed She'at and who distrusted America all the way. He looked as if he was bewitched, and I asked him, "So, what do you think of this man? Do you still consider him an invader?" My friend smiled, still touched and said, "Absolutely not! He brought tears to my eyes. God bless him."

Another friend approached me. This one was not religious but he was one of the conspiracy theory believers. He put his hands on my shoulders and said smiling, "I must admit that I'm beginning to believe in what you've been telling us for months and I'm beginning to have faith in America. I never thought that they will hand us sovereignty in time. These people have shown that they keep their promises."

Dr. Foad Ajami (author of the excellent Dream Palaces of the Arabs), writes of the transfer of power, and responsibility:

America is not to stay long in Iraq. No scheme is being hatched for the subjugation of Iraq's people. No giant American air bases on their soil are in the offing. In their modern history, Iraqis witnessed direct British control over their country (from 1921 to 1932), followed by a quarter-century of a subtle British role in their politics, hidden behind a façade of national independence. Ours is a different world, and this new "imperium" is the imperium of a truly reluctant Western power.

What shall stick of America's truth on the soil of Iraq is an open, unknowable question. But the leaders who waged this war--those "architects" of it who have been thrown on the defensive by its difficulties and surprises--should be forgiven the sense that things broke their way during that five-minute surprise ceremony yesterday morning. They haven't created a "new" Iraq, and sure enough, they have not tackled the malignancies of the Arab world which lay at the roots, and the very origins, of this war. America isn't acquitted yet of its burdens in Mesopotamia. Our heartbreaking losses are a daily affair, and our soldiers there remain in harm's way.

But we now stay under new terms--a power that vacated sovereignty 48 hours ahead of schedule, and an Iraqi population that can glimpse, just a horizon away, the possibility of a society free from both native tyranny and foreign control. There is nervousness in Iraq: the nervousness of a people soon to be put to the test by the promise--and the hazards--of freedom.

["Iraq's New History" Wall Street Journal June 29, 2004]

Related Links & Updates:

• "Blogging the watchdogs", by John Leo. U.S. News and World Report July 19, 2004. Mr. Leo covers the lapses (and deliberate maliciousness) of the mainstream press:
  The Washington Post said Bremer left without giving a talk. The Los Angeles Times did worse. It missed the speech, then insulted Bremer for not giving it. A July 4 Times "news analysis" said: "L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator for Iraq, left without even giving a final speech to the country--almost as if he were afraid to look in the eye the people he had ruled for more than a year." This is a good one-sentence example of what readers object to in much Iraq reporting--dubious or wrong information combined with a heavy load of attitude from the reporter.

More Good News from Iraq

Chrenkoff posts the 5th installment of GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ. Catch up on all the latest news you're probably not getting anywhere else.

Saturn!

Think about it . . . NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft back in 1997 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida; it arrived at Saturn July 1, 2004 and istransmitting photographs 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion km) across space.

That's pretty darn cool.

Thomas Kinkade - Artist or Megalomaniac?

My wife and I just saw a piece on the popular American artist Thomas Kinkade -- chances are you've seen one of his paintings in a home or office:

Who is the artist who has sold more canvases than any other painter in history? More than Picasso, Rembrandt, Gaughin, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Van Gogh combined?

If you didn't say Thomas Kinkade, then you’ve been shopping in the wrong places. He is the most collected living artist in the U.S. and worldwide.

He produces paintings by the container load. And he is to art what Henry Ford was to automobiles. . . . READ MORE

This guy figured out a way to mass-produce his oil paintings (not just photo-reproducing; he actually 'hand-touches' the copies w/ his brush, and sells the framed paintings at $1000 to 50,000 a pop. He's mass-marketed his paintings to the masses, followed by the 'Walt Disney' hailstorm of products:

"You can put a Thomas Kinkade couch beneath your Thomas Kinkade painting. Next to the Thomas Kinkade couch goes the Thomas Kinkade end table. On top of that goes your collection of Thomas Kinkade books, Thomas Kinkade collectibles, Thomas Kinkade throw rugs. You can snuggle your Thomas Kinkade teddy bear. . . . and you can put all of that inside your new Thomas Kinkade home in the Thomas Kinkade subdivision."

No kidding. "More than 100 homes, all modeled on his cutesy, cozy cottages, have been built in Vallejo, Calif., outside San Francisco."

Either this guy is hellbent on making a buck or he's so utterly convinced of his own Kinkade vision of how reality ought to be (cottages, lighthouses, gardens, in lovely rainbow brilliance) that he wants to evangelize the world and make converts of us all. He's the veritable HITLER of mass-market art.

Every now and then when somebody sees my portfolio they suggest that I sell my work; every now and then I'm honestly tempted, but this manner of art-turned-commercialism really freaks me out.

Bill Clinton's Legacy

Bill Clinton's latest attempt to define his legacy is a 957-page book called My Life. Though panned by the New York Times as "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull," hard-core Clinton supporters still waited eight hours or more to have the former president sign their copies. As the line of autograph-seekers snaked around the corner of Broadway and Wall Street in lower Manhattan, [Brain-Terminal.Com] asked the Clintophiles for their thoughts on Bill, his book, and his legacy.

There is another, opposite danger in the seamless integration of the churches into the forces of social progress. This process raises the question of the “free spirit” and “honest animal” of a democrat who unexpectedly bursts in upon the argument of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals:

Does the church today still have any necessary role to play [in aiding the progress of democracy]? Does it still have the right to exist? Or could one do without it?... Certainly it has, over the years, become something crude and boorish, something repellent to a more delicate intellect, to a truly modern taste.

Once encouraged to conceive Christianity primarily as a buttress for progressive morality, we might come to see it as superfluous. If we welcome religion only because we cherish liberal social policy, why can’t our commitment to the policy roll happily along on its own? Of course, the mainline churches have continued to participate in public debate. If anything, they have defined themselves ever more in terms of their social activism. What they have increasingly lacked is anything distinctively Christian to bring to the table. Thus, mainline religion, despite its efforts to please, has become merely incidental to the lives of so many who continue to profess it.

Clifford Orwin, "The Unraveling of Christianity in America"
The Public Interest, Spring 2004

"The Order" (2003)

"The Order" is the 'religious horror film' genre's equivalent of 'gigli' (Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez) -- so excruciatingly boring, so appallingly bad, you'll either be entertained by the fact that, just when it can't get any worse, IT DOES . . . or wind up flogging yourself for having wasted two perfectly good hours of your life.

It's hard to believe that Brian Helgeland, who wrote the screenplay for "Mystic River" and adapted "L.A. Confidential", could produce something so utterly ridiculous, so profoundly bad in every possible way.

May God forgive him for this aesthetic sacrilege.

Michael Moore and the "Dumbing Down" of the Left

Liberals are fawning over Michael Moore's "mockumentary" Fahrenheit 911 with a religious furvor akin to Catholic zeal for Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ. I found the sentiments expressed in this review by Stewart Klawans for The Nation oddly familar to those expressed by Christians exiting the theater after seeing Gibson's dramatization:

You don't much monitor your own reactions. But then, as you leave the movie house, you might notice that the sidewalk chatter sounds oddly muffled, the traffic looks a little blurred, as you begin to realize that your attention has not come outside with you; it's still in the dark, struggling with the feelings that Fahrenheit 9/11 called up and didn't resolve. Are you outraged, heartbroken, vengeful, morose, gloating, thoughtful, electrified? Moore has elicited all of these emotions and then had the nerve--the filmmaker's nerve--to leave you to sort them out. . . . I think there are two bundles of messages in Fahrenheit 9/11, one political and one emotional--and while the first is about as ambiguous as a call to take up pitchforks and torches and storm the castle, the second is too complex to unsettle those in power. It works to unsettle you. It's what makes Fahrenheit 9/11 a real movie.

Yes, I suppose in a way the discovery that the Bush administration engineered the war in Iraq with the sole motive of making profits off Arab oil and Halliburton labor contracts is something like a religious epiphany.

The reason I don't like Michael Moore is NOT because he's anti-Republican -- it's entirely possible to offer criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the war in a reasonable and civilized manner. The problem with Michael Moore is that he so effectively contributes to the dumbing down of the Left by his willing indulgence in radical conspiracy-theorizing and vulger anti-Americanism, as recently exposed by David Brooks ("All Hail Moore" New York Times June 26, 2004).

Here's Moore on how he really feels about Americans:

"They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet . . . in thrall to conniving, thieving smug [pieces of the human anatomy] . . . We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing. . . .

"That's why we're smiling all the time. You can see us coming down the street. You know, `Hey! Hi! How's it going?' We've got that big [expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains aren't loaded down."

Here's Moore on the complexities of the U.S. - Iraqi conflict (in an interview with the Japanese press):

"The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich."

And here's Moore -- in his message posted on his website, April 14, 2004 -- on the Islamic fundamentalists who are ambushing our troops and beheading hostages:

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not `insurgents' or `terrorists' or `The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win."

This coming from a self-proclaimed "filthy-rich multi-millionare" who portrays himself on screen as a scruffy blue-collar "man of the people" while living in a posh apartment in Manhattan and demanding up to $38,000 in "speaking fees" for a single engagement at Kansas University.

In related news, Ralph Nader accused Moore of selling out his friends for the Democratic Party Establishment in an open letter to his website.

Related Links:

• Watching Michael Moore - new blog by yours truly.
• MooreExposed.Com
• MooreLies.Com

Noam Chomsky's blog "manufactures consent."

Blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh has figured out how radical political critic Noam Chomsky deals with unwanted commentators on his blog (i.e., those who disagree with him):

. . . In order to comment on the Chomsky blog--or on other ZNet blogs--one has to donate to ZNet. Since donations in all likelihood come overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) from people who buy into the ZNet editorial line, the only people who are allowed to comment on ZNet blogs like Chomsky's are people who by and large agree with him.

To call this arrangement intellectually cowardly is to unfairly malign intellectual cowards. If the whole effect of a comments system is simply to create an echo chamber, then any self-respecting blogger would refrain from such an arrangement. It appears, however, that the ZNet crowd is not so high-minded.

You mean there's good news from Iraq?!?

Blogger Chrenkoff has compiled the fourth installment of "Good news from Iraq". Those who need to catch up can read parts 1, 2, and 3.

Amusing spam of the week.

It's not every day that you get spam mail for Viagra beginning with the line:

Moreover, such was the scarcity of labor and the pecuniary inducements held out, that many poor people sold themselves in order to reach these shores.

Ronald Reagan 1911 - 2004

"Let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that day may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."

Ronald Reagan, Nov. 5, 1994.

• Ronald Reagan's Farewell Address. Given to the nation after his eight years as president, delivered in the Oval Office on January 11, 1989.
• Remarks by the President. President George W. Bush
• Reagan's Greatness, a look back by William Kristol. The Weekly Standard Nov. 10, 1997.
• Ronald Reagan's Rainbow, by Paul Kengor. National Review Online, June 5, 2004.

Cool blog. Cool band.

A really cool musically-oriented blog. They get a mention here simply on account of this wonderful post about an excellent band Swervedriver (particularly their album Mezcal Head). Yay!

Andy Kaufmann returns . . .

. . . yes, but how can we be sure it's really him? ;-)